Chuck Berry, Fiery and Flinty Rock ’n’ Roll Innovator

Chuck Berry, shown in 1980, created a sound and style that made him rock ’n’ roll’s first true superstar.

Associated Press

By JON CARAMANICA

March 19, 2017

Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” wasn’t the first rock ’n’ roll song, but it was the best and brashest of the genre’s early advertisements. Released in 1956, it opens with a nimble, bendy guitar riff — a prelude to the one that would be perfected a year later, on “Johnny B. Goode” — that serves as an intrusion and an enticement. Then Mr. Berry describes the fever, “the rockin’ pneumonia,” that was soon to grip the country.

Plenty of artists would go on to cover “Roll Over Beethoven” — the Beatles streamlined and sweetened it; Electric Light Orchestra distended it into an overlong, pompous shuffle with a snatch of the Fifth Symphony; Paul Shaffer and his band made a sleek version as the theme to the 1992 film “Beethoven,” about a St. Bernard with the composer’s name.

But those covers lacked the panache, the transgressive potential, the unexpected twists and turns of the Chuck Berry originals.

Mr. Berry, who died on Saturday at his home near St. Louis, was the first true rock ’n’ roll superstar. When in his late 20s he emerged from St. Louis onto the national scene, the genre wasn’t yet codified. In its infancy, rock was hybrid music, and Mr. Berry was its most vivid and imaginative alchemist.

From the mid-1950s through the end of that decade, he concocted a yowling blend of hopped-up blues, country and then-emergent rhythm & blues that ended up as the template for what became widely accepted as rock ’n’ roll (though the term predated his rise).

Video Jon Pareles, a music critic for The New York Times, reflects on the pioneering music and attitude of the rock legend Chuck Berry.

Donal F. Holway/The New York Times

He gave it virtuoso playing via guitar work that drew on country and the blues. He made it a songwriting genre with wry, detailed lyrics that helped shape the idea of American freedom via stories of teenage abandon or open-road adventure. He embodied the music by giving it physical language, from his signature duck walk to his coiffure, which was equal parts structure and flair. (He also was a beautician, having studied hairdressing and cosmetology when he was still playing in small bands in St. Louis in the early 1950s.) And in performance, he sold the music hard, with eyes bulging, hips swaying and a sly smile that indicated he knew just how much he was pushing the envelope.

That archetype of rock ’n’ roll swagger would define the next couple of decades of global pop music. Without his twitchy, gloriously accessible songs, there would have been no Rolling Stones, no Beatles, no Bob Dylan — at least not as we know them now.

While Elvis Presley, flaunting his sexuality, was making himself into the original teen-idol pop star, Mr. Berry was being policed, both figuratively and literally. On songs like “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” he sang, in judiciously coded language, about pushing back against segregation. In his autobiography, he wrote that he changed a phrase in “Johnny B. Goode” from “little colored boy” to “little country boy” because he “thought it would seem biased to white fans.” Instead, he coded a tale of racial achievement in terms he felt would be more broadly palatable.

But Mr. Berry was still a successful black man in a pre-civil rights world, and as such, he was a target. He was prosecuted twice under the Mann Act, for bringing a minor across state lines for immoral purpose. The first time he was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal because of racial remarks made by the judge. The second time, he was convicted again, and he served more than a year and a half in federal prison. His career never quite recovered. White artists had been studying him, and were building up a version of rock ’n’ roll that no longer required Mr. Berry, nor his blackness.

So if, for the remainder of his very long career, he was a bit flinty, could you blame him? The tug of war between what he was expected to provide and what he hoped to receive was constant. He was obstinate about his influence. He demanded to be paid up front for performances. He often toured with just his guitar, hiring local bands, not speaking to them and expecting them to know his music well enough to back him. (The results were spotty.)

Even when he was being celebrated, Mr. Berry grated. On the occasion of his 60th birthday, Keith Richards convened an all-star band to perform a pair of tribute concerts with him. They were filmed for a documentary, “Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” which began as a glowing commemoration of Mr. Berry’s talent and reach and ended up a document of his intransigence. His guitar playing and singing were electric, and so was his quarreling.

Mr. Berry seemed inclined to believe that rock ’n’ roll belonged to him and no one else. In that documentary, Jerry Lee Lewis said that the first time the two met, they fought over who was the true king of the genre.

And Mr. Berry had a particularly fraught push-and-pull friction with the white artists who benefited the most from the style he innovated. In the documentary, Mr. Richards is his leading antagonist. And many years later, Mr. Richards told a story about being backstage at one of Mr. Berry’s shows and laying eyes on Mr. Berry’s guitar, sitting in an open case. Enthralled, he began to play it, but when Mr. Berry caught him in the act, Mr. Richards recalled, he punched him dead in the face.